Swallowed by the Internet

These last few days, I’ve had the feeling of being completely inundated by the freebies and goodies available on the internet. My interests – as readers know – are rather weird things such as the process of change; the machinery of government; the strange fixation anglo-saxons have developed over the past 40 years or so for “reforming” it; and the mental maps we use to make sense of all these things. 

At the weekend, I cam across a couple of items which took me back some 5 years to the 

point at which I realised I had become totally confused by all the talk about “systems 

thinking” and “complexity” and developed one of my famous tables to encourage me to get some clarification. 
Here I am some 5 years later still confused – so that clearly didn’t work. 

But a couple of items looked promising – first Systems thinking for social change by David Stroh (2015) 

which offered 2 pluses. 

• It’s a lot clearer than the books I listed in 2018 and 

• it’s in the field of social change which is one which has long fascinated me. 

Sure it’s a bit repetitive – if not formulistic in that American way – but its clarity and optimism 

encourage forgiveness. There’s an interview with him here. 
His approach has been much influenced by the work of Donella Meadows and, if you read 

just one thing about systems theory, I strongly urge you to read her short paper on Leverage Points which just might take you to her “Thinking in Systems – a primer”; Donella Meadows (2008) 

That then led me to a little 2017 publication from the OECD – "Complexity and Policymaking” and another intriguing pamphlet Building Better Systems; Charles Leadbetter (2020) which is certainly formulaistic as indicated by this excerpt

One simple way to sum this up as a rule of thumb is to remember that 3 x 4 = 12.

• System innovation involves work across three levels, the macro, meso and micro;

• Change is unlocked using the four keys: purpose, power resources and relationships;

system innovation involves people playing 12 roles

But that led me to a highly readable book which has just been published in open edition Wicked Problems in Public Policy by Brian Head (2022) and "Complexity and the Art of Public Policy – solving society's problems from the bottom up" David Colander and Roland Kupers (2014)

As if that wasn't enough, I was then sucked in by Martin Stanley's brilliant website named simply UK Civil Servant by a QUITE BRILLIANT summary of the various recent disasters which have struck the UK. Surfing brought me material I only vaguely knew about.

Radical Visions of Future Government (NESTA 2019) Some zany ideas 170pp

Windrush Lessons Learned (2020) an independent report ordered by the Home Sec of the time. It’s 280 pages long!

Civil Service-Ministerial Relations (Bennett Institute 2022)

Reimagining the State – an essay (Reform 2022) 15pp

Reimagining whitehall (Reform 2022) 20pp

By that stage, I just wanted to shoud out "Stop the World, I want to get off!

Confessions of a reformed managerialist

I have to confess to an enthusiastic managerialist youth, most evident in the paean to corporate management in my article What Sort of Overgovernment? in the 1975 Red Paper on Scotland (when I was 32) edited by the even more youthful Gordon Brown. The "management of change" literature which flooded the market in the 1990s was even the subject of a chapter in my In Transit – notes on good governance in 1999 but the experience of New Labour's Performance targeting began to raise doubts in my mind - crystallised by "The Audit Explosion" pamphlet which had been published a few years earlier

Most of us are aware of the new managerial layer which blocks us all – in one way or another. It’s become the butt of comedy and is our everyday experience whether as consumers being frustrated by call-centres; as office-workers angered by managerial pretensions and bullshit or as doctors, nurses, teachers and academics reporting to new managerial levels who complete the forms to keep the audit machine ticking over. 

But I want to understand how on earth we’ve allowed this to happen… to explore, in my own case, how I become first enthused, disappointed and, ultimately, disillusioned. After all, I had been exposed in the early 1970s both to the anarchical element of Ivan Illich’s philosophy and to the practicalities of community action. How on earth could I fall prey to the seductions of managerialism?

And what do I mean by the term, anyway? What exactly is this "managerialism"

Stewart Clegg is one of the most experienced writers on management and wrote a decade ago a marvellous little article called "Managerialism – born in the USA" which begins with the words of the Bruce Springsteen song. It's actually a review of a couple of important books on the subject and starts with their attempts to define managerialism. According to one, it is

what occurs when a special group, called management, ensconces itself systematically in an organization and deprives owners and employees of their decision-making power (including the distribution of emoluments)—and justifies that takeover on the grounds of the managing group’s education and exclusive possession of the codified bodies of knowledge and know-how necessary to the efficient running of the organization, (2009: 28).

By contrast, Thomas Klikauer emphasizes ideology:

Managerialism combines management knowledge and ideology to establish itself systematically in organizations and society while depriving owners, employees, (organizational-economical) and civil society (social-political) of all decision-making powers. Managerialism justifies the application of managerial techniques to all areas of society on the grounds of superior ideology, expert training, and the exclusive possession of managerial knowledge necessary to efficiently run corporations and societies …

Basically therefore it's

• a claim to special knowledge (similar to that made in medieval times by priests!)

• a successful attempt to muscle ahead in the status stakes

Those of you interested in pursuining these issues further should look at this list 

I should emphasise that these are not management textbooks – or the pop-management 

stuff you buy in airports. They are rather critical reflections on this body of thinking. 

Key
Articles

The Managerialist Credo; Glover, McGowan and Tracey (2021) A quite excellent overview of the topic

The Political Economy of Managerialism; Eagelton_Pearce and Kanfo (2020) which explores why pol econ seems to have ignored this issue

Managerialism – an ideology and its evolution; Christine Doran (2016) A very clear and useful overview of the literature

Managerialism and the continuing project of state reform Janet Newman and John Clarke (2016) A rather more academic treatment of aspects of public sector reform

NPM – the dark side of managerial enlightenment; Thomas Diefenbach (2000) Focused on the issues raised by the market-based new public management.

Books

Managerialism – the emergence of a new ideology by Willard Enteman (1993) rather pedantic treatment by a US academic focusing more on socialism, capitalism and democracy than on managerialism

Managing Britannia – culture and management in modern Britain; Robert Protherough and John Pick (2003)

Against Management – organisation in the age of managerialism; Martin Parker (2004) I didn’t find this book all that interesting when I first skimmed it quite a few years ago – but that probably says more about my impatience with a lot of sociologists

The Making of Modern Management – British management in historical perspective Wilson and Thomson (2006) Very thorough and u8seful treatment by 2 British economic historians

The Age of Heretics – a history of the radical thinkers who reinvented corporate management Art Kleiner (2008) a US journalist examines the past half century for key moments in a racy read.

Management and the Dominance of Managers – an inquiry into why and how managers rule our organisations; Thomas Diefenbach (2009) suggests that the question of how managers have gained their excessive power has not been sufficiently explored…..This google excerpt is in “academese” but you can still sense his concerns

Rethinking Management – radical insights from the complexity sciences ; Chris Mowles (2011) A delightful and very thoughtful book from an experienced consultant trying to rethink his profession from first principles….

Confronting Managerialism - How the Business Elite and Their Schools Threw Our Lives Out of Balance Robert R. Locke and J.-C. Spender (2011) Locke is an American Prof who has been very critical of managerialism

Managerialism – a critique of an ideology Thomas Klikauer (2013) written by a German who started as an engineer and trade unionist and now teaches Australian MBA students, this is a superb and comprehensive attack on the pretensions of managerialism.

The Silo Effect – the peril of expertise Gillian Tett (2015) Tett is a financial journalist and anthropologist and this is a very practical attack on groupthink

Strategic management and organisational dynamics Ralph Stacey and Chris Mowles (2016) a very thorough and critical assessment which contrasts “realist” and “postmodern” approaches and suggests a better, more reflective way

The Triumph of Managerialism? New Technologies of Government and their implications for value edited by Anna Yeatman, Bogdan Costea (2018) Have only google excerpts

Anarchism, organisation and management Martin Parker (2020) This is an update to his 2004 book – he’s also published an interesting Dictionary of Alternative Organisations

How did the managerial genie escape the bottle?

Although I’ve devoted 3 posts to Tom Nairn, I have to confess that it was John Stewart who played a far greater role în my life, work and thoughts. On the lines of Kurt Vonnegut’s Fahrenheit 451 it would be fascinating to visualise our minds scanned for the images of the books and writers who had meant most to us at different stages of our lives. În the 1970s and 1980s, Stewart loomed large – aș you can see from the paragraph praising corporate planning in my 1975 article What Sort of Overgovernment?

”Corporate management should be about the translation of what is essentually a socialist principle into management and planning processes – in its technocratic form, however, it freezes a sociological insiight into an elitist technique. It breaks down some barriers (within the local authority) only to erect others (between the community and the local authority)”

Virtually all the references in that piece are to communities and municipalities, not to nationalism or Nairn with a reference to ”untapped areas of power with the municipality...if only the services could work with – rather than against – each other" perhaps revealing a sign of my naivety. By 1999 when I tried to summarise the lessons of public admin reform for central europeans and central Asians emerging from decades of communism, I had clearly changed my tune and emphasised instead the powerful political realities which make such attempts at corporate management almost impossible. What follows is an excerpt from In Transit – notes on good governance (1999) – after which a further post will try to deal with the issue which has been exercising me a lot these past few years – namely how on earth we have succumbed so badly to the "management revolution”.

Why reform was so difficult in the 1970s

• the electoral cycle encouraged short-term thinking

• there did not seem to be a definable "product" or measure of performance for government against which progress (or lack of it) could be tested.

• and even if there were, politicians need to build and maintain coalitions of support : and not give hostages to fortune. They therefore prefer to keep their options open and use the language of rhetoric rather than precision!

• The machinery of government consists of a powerful set of "baronies" (Ministries/Departments), each with their own interests

• the permanent experts have advantages of status, security, professional networks and time which effectively give them more power than politicians who would often simply "present" what they were given. This has changed considerably since I wrote this!

• a Government is a collection of individually ambitious politicians whose career path rewards skills of survival rather than those of achieving specific changes

• the democratic rhetoric of accountability makes it difficult for the politician to resist interference in administrative detail, even when they have nominally decentralised and delegated.

• politicians can (and do) blame others : hardly the best climate for strategy work

These forces were so powerful that, during the 1970s, writers on policy analysis seemed near to giving up on the possibility of government systems ever being able to effect coherent change - in the absence of national emergencies. This was reflected in such terms as state overload” and "disjointed incrementalism": and in the growth of a new literature on the problems of "Implementation" which recognised the power of the "street-level" bureaucrats - both negatively, to block change, and positively to help inform and smooth change by being more involved in the policy-making.

Neo-liberals and public choice theorists offered a convincing theory. In the meantime, however, the 1970s gave the opportunity for neo-liberalism in the UK. Ideas of market failure - which had provided the post-war justification for the welfare state - were replaced by ideas about government failure. The Economist journal expressed the difference in its own inimitable way –

"The instinct of social democrats has been invariably to send for Government. You defined a problem. You called in the social scientists to propose a programme to solve it. You called on the Government to finance the programme: and the desired outcome would result. What the neo-liberals began to say was the exact opposite of this. There probably wasn't a problem: if there was, social scientists probably misunderstood it: it was probably insoluble: and, in any case, government efforts to solve it would probably make it worse"

The very concept of rational government acting dispassionately in the public interest was attacked by neo-liberals on three grounds –

"Vote-maximising politicians, as the public choice theorists demonstrated (Buchanan and Tullock 1962), will produce policies that do not necessarily serve the public interest, while utility-maximising bureaucrats (Niskanen 1971) have their own private agenda for the production of public policies. The growth of the welfare state had brought with it an army of professional groups, who supplied the services. These were teachers, doctors, dentists, planners etc in bureaucratic organisations sheltered from the winds and gales of competitive forces. Provided free of charge at the point of consumption, there will always be an excess demand ; at the same time it is in the interest of monopolised professional providers to over-supply welfare services. Public expenditure on welfare services, in the absence of market testing, exceeds its optimum".

"The problems don't end there. Professional groups decide upon the level, mix and quality of services according to their definition and assessment of need, without reference to users' perceptions or assessments of what is required. The result is that not only is public expenditure on welfare services too high; it is also of the wrong type".

And finally the issue of efficiency; in the absence of the profit motive and the disciplinary powers of competitive markets, slack and wasteful practices can arise and usually do. Within bureaucracies, incentives seldom exist to ensure that budgets are spent efficiently and effectively. Often there is no clear sense of purpose or direction."

Fundamental concepts of public administration - eg hierarchy, equity and uniformity - were unceremoniously dumped.

To be Continued

John Stewart – who transformed our understanding of the capabilities of local government

I have just learned that the man who inspired me to start a Local Government 
Research Unit in the West of Scotland in 1970; who made local government believe 
in itself; and whose example helped me in my policy innovation work in Strathclyde Region 
from 1974 died in November, aged 93. 
But such are the curious selection criteria of UK newspapers that it was only a few
days ago that I discovered his obituary – in the “Other Lives” section of The
Guardian, reserved for friends and family. He wasn’t considered important enough to
warrant inclusion on his own merits! But his work had a huge influence on so many
officials and politicians in British local government. It’s his voice which can be heard 
in the paean of praise I offered up to corporate management in my contribution
 (on page 76) to the 1975 Red Paper on Scotland – What Sort of Overgovernment? 
As one of his colleagues says about his work -

less about management and more a political theory of local government with
 equality and the redistribution of power and resources at its heart. 
I concluded he was a son of the Fabian tradition.

John Stewart was appointed in 1966 to the Institute of Local Government –
 (INLOGOV) at the University of Birmingham. This was just 2 years before I was
 first elected to a town council and then appointed as a Lecturer in a Polytechnic
I will let his daughter’s tribute establish the essentials

The following year he created the Advanced Management Development
Programme, consisting of 10-week-long residential courses held at
Wast Hills House outside Birmingham. It had its own culture –
everything was off the record, there was no assessment or exams,
references were not given on the basis of the courses. Through these
courses John knew most of the chief executives of councils in England
and Wales. This, and his articles in the Local Government Chronicle and 
John was born and brought up in Stockport. His father, David, was a doctor
and a lecturer at Manchester University. His mother, Phyllis (nee
Crossley), had worked at the Manchester Stationery Office before her
marriage. From Stockport grammar school John won a place at Balliol
College, Oxford. But first he did national service; he was posted to
Iraq, where he caught polio and was invalided home. He came off
relatively lightly, still able to walk. He went to Oxford in
1949, where he studied philosophy, politics and economics, and joined
the Oxford Union. After graduating, John studied for a DPhil at
Nuffield College, Oxford, on the influence of British pressure
groups on the government. This was published in 1958. By then he
was working for the National Coal Board, where he became head
of industrial relations in the South Yorkshire coalfield. However,
when the Conservative government appointed Alf Robens as NCB chair,
he became disillusioned. John decided to move into academia, and in
1966 was appointed to lead work on British local government at
INLOGOV; he was later made professor and then director.
I can’t remember the first visit I made to INLOGOV or my first
encounter of John – nor the sequence of events which led to the
establishment of my own little Unit in Paisley. Rod Rhodes – whom I
knew briefly in the 1970s – paints a wonderful vignette of John in this tribute
John was an idiosyncratic and inspiring speaker. He held his local government
 audiences in the palm of his hand as he talked about such potentially uninspiring 
subjects as corporate management. In part, it was his appearance. He threw on his
 suits and missed. He walked with a limp, a hangover from polio in his youth. He shaved 
but random patches of stubble would remain. He would twist and break biros and paper
 clips in his fingers as he talked. He would pace the floor, then twist himself around a
 chair or a table. Svengali-like, he mesmerized his audience. I have been on teaching
 courses, which advised me either on how to present to live audiences or on TV. No
 course recommended John's style or anything near to it. How could it? The man was 
the style. Like it or loathe it, it was distinctive, and it worked. I learned that lecturing
 was about having your own presence. Universities have templates for appraising staff. 
At best, they set a minimum standard. To command an audience, to communicate your
 enthusiasm and love of your subject, you must project yourself. In a small way, you
 are an actor. John showed me by example how to lecture, and his lesson stood me in
 good stead. 

INLOGOV marketed its wares to local government, so we had to write for the local
 government magazines such as the Local Government Chronicle and Municipal Journal.
 The advantage of publishing in these journals is that I learned to write for a local
 government audience. The magazines had copy editors. My colleagues from local
 government offered advice. INLOGOV encouraged me to practice the art of
 translating one's research for practitioners. The problem was that such
 translations counted for nought on my academic CV. To move to another university,
 to gain promotion at my existing university, I had to publish in academic journals. The
 academic tradition and the search for relevance to practitioners posed a dilemma for
 me. Mainly, my work was practitioner-oriented, and the worst practical project was
 about the impact of European Community regulations on British local government. The
 pamphlet I wrote sold literally tens of thousands of copies to local authorities, many
 of whom bought it in bulk. It was worse than useless on my CV. John was aware of the
 practitioner/academic dilemma confronting all his younger colleagues, not just me, and
 sought to change the intellectual ethos of INLOGOV. 

I was commissioned by the Committee of Inquiry into Local Government Finance
 (Layfield) to look broadly at the relationship between central and local government. It
 was a turning point in my career. I was indebted yet again to John Stewart, who was a
 member of the Committee. John gave me the opportunity to write about
 intergovernmental relations while Bob suggested I look for inspiration in the theories
 about organizations. Most of my report to the Layfield Committee Rhodes, (1976) was
 a review of the literature but it contained one novel idea. I suggested that central
 government–local government relations should be seen as a set of actors embedded in
 complex networks of administrative politics. This notion of policy networks was to
 inform my work for the next 10 years. I am struck by the happenstance of it all.
 There is a great temptation to suggest that your career had a logic; that it unfolded 
according to a plan, in a linear way. In practice, it was a case of grasping opportunities
 that others presented to me. I was lucky to have John Stewart as a mentor actively
 seeking out opportunities for me. I was looking for my own voice and he helped me
 find it. John supported my academic endeavours, and, on occasion, he too would write
 for an academic audience. But his heart lay with local government, with defending and
 improving it. As I look back, I do not think the academic community ever gave him
 due credit for this work. The local government community was more discerning. His
 1972 book “Managenent in Local Government” was less a book about management
 and more a political theory of local government with equality and the
 redistribution of power and resources at its heart. I concluded he was a son of the
 Fabian tradition. Of course, his work had an important impact on the management of
 local government but equally it was a stirring defence of local democracy. INLOGOV
 remains as a monument to his contribution, and we need it to carry on his teachings.
 We need a voice defending local democracy as much today as we ever did. 

John Stewart wanted local government to be to exercise community leadership. Sadly, 
in Britain, the scale of local, unelected Quangos has made that impossible – but it still remains an important
dream. In a future post, I want to explore further the notion of “Joined-up” or “Holistic
 Government” which was an important theme in New Labour’s last spell 1997-2010.
Rest In Peace, John Stewart.